Last month, DMC joined hundreds of other National Instruments professionals at the annual NIWeek conference. DMC’s Darren Jones, Jon Carson, Jason Mayes, Jesse Batsche, Peter Rijks, Bill Sowerwine, Nick Aroneseno, Mark Locascio, and Steven Dusing attended the event in Austin, Texas. The conference is an opportunity for DMC engineers to expand their NI knowledge base, talk to other NI professionals, and give presentations on relevant topics.
What is NIWeek?
Per National Instruments, “NI brings together thousands of engineers, scientists, and industry professionals to learn about the latest NI software-centric platform for accelerating development and increasing productivity in test, measurement, and control systems.”
NIWeek Activities
- Training and certification opportunities
- Interactive technical sessions
- Exhibitions on the latest advancements
- Keynote presentations from industry thought leaders
Technology Updates
LabVIEW Next Gen (NXG)
It was a very exciting year for NI as they officially released LabVIEW NXG to the public and announced their plans for feature additions in the future.
LabVIEW NXG looks to provide a much-needed update to the LabVIEW user interface using WPF and vector graphics. It also contains many nice development improvements, including an NI Package Manager for easier code reuse and a built-in hardware configuration manager that will ultimately replace NI MAX.
What does this mean for DMC?
While the future for LabVIEW NXG is very exciting, the practical use of this program is still a few years out. The current version of LabVIEW NXG 1.0 is a very tightly scoped application that does not offer the full set of features of traditional LabVIEW (but will eventually, per NI).
Therefore, DMC will continue to develop in LabVIEW until LabVIEW NXG has enough supported features to make it a viable option for client work.
Malleable VIs
The 2017 version of traditional LabVIEW comes with several new features. The most exciting is probably the Malleable VIs, which are basically a new and improved version of Polymorphic VIs, though they both may have their ideal use cases.
This should reduce the need to program multiple similar subroutines to account for different data types. If you make a Malleable VI and LabVIEW can compile it for different data types, then it will automatically accommodate them in your code.
SIL-3 rated I/O modules
We were excited to see the introduction of SIL-3 rated I/O modules to the CompactRIO family of products at NIWeek, as DMC is involved in programming many safety rated systems.
For a long time, a machine safety requirement has meant that NI and LabVIEW were not an option. While the new products are still limited (limited in the number of inputs/outputs and types), it is a big step in expanding the platform to be competitive in the world of functionally safe machinery and processes. The quality of the presentations, and the exhibitors, were impressive and exciting to see!
Check out a list of more great updates with LabVIEW 2017.
Presenting at NIWeek
DMC was proud to lead three presentations at NIWeek 2017. You can follow the links below to view each presentation.
IIoT: Connecting LabVIEW, CompactRIO, and Microsoft Azure IoT - Darren Jones, Peter Rijks, Jon Carson
Practical Web Applications You’ll Actually Care About - Mark Locascio and Nick Aroneseno
Save Time and Look Awesome: Apply UI Design Principles to Real World Projects - Steven Dusing and Jesse Batsche
I was excited to speak at NI Week for the first time. After spending hours developing the DMC LabVIEW UI Suite, it was fun sharing the process with other developers. We also officially released our DMC LabVIEW UI Suite to the public at this lecture, which is available for download.
The Sights and Sounds
Aside from the technical sessions, there's plenty of other fun entertainment to be found at NIWeek.
We enjoyed a concert at the conference after party on Wednesday night.
DMC enjoyed a group lunch from Torchy’s Tacos before leaving Austin on Thursday. They were dang delicious.
Learn about DMC’s Test & Measurement Automation Services.